Charles Campbell Arthttp://charlescampbellart.com
Visual ArtistWed, 13 Feb 2019 18:51:03 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1Six Steps To Avoiding Tokenismhttp://charlescampbellart.com/2017/12/six-steps-to-avoiding-tokenism
http://charlescampbellart.com/2017/12/six-steps-to-avoiding-tokenism#commentsSat, 09 Dec 2017 00:18:23 +0000charleshttp://charlescampbellart.com/?p=1517»Read More]]>Tokenism. There’s that word again. This time thrown into a conversation about the lack of racial diversity in Canadian art institutions by a well meaning, white, gallery worker. Firstly, yes, it is insulting to be made to believe your employment is based on your skin colour, so thank you for your concern. But no, fear of “tokenizing” is never an excuse for the startling lack of diversity of your arts organization. Neither is “we just hire the best person for the job.” That is unless the job is maintaining the status quo and the de facto exclusion of people of colour as producers of culture in Canada. There are exceptions, but comprehensive surveys of the arts in Canada reveal that Indigenous people and people of colour are under represented, underpaid and denied positions of authority in Canadian arts institutions.

So here are six steps to help you avoid tokenizing, hire the best person for the job, and help undo the deeply embedded institutional racism of the Canadian arts establishment.

1. Look at who you serve.
Your mission statement no doubt has a lot of nice words about what your organization does and who it serves. Put it aside and take a look at who actually comes to your exhibitions, openings and events. If your exhibitions audience is predominantly white, you serve white people. If there are only a few people of colour at your openings, you likely only listen to white people. If your events only attract a narrow socio-economic range, that’s the range you serve. Simple.

2. Look at who you are.
Who do you hire, who holds positions of authority, who’s on your board? If there are people of colour in the organization, do they hold junior or senior positions? Are they full or part time, contract or permanent? The perspectives that are welcome in your organization is in large part dependant on who makes up your organization, from the top down.

3. Own up
Do you like what you see? If you do, great, own up to it. Put it right in your mission statement and front and centre on all your grants. “We are lead by people of European descent and serve a predominantly white community interested in experimental, electronic music from a European lineage.” Looks like a winner to me.

4. Change
If you don’t like what you see then you have to change how you do things. Years of hiring “the best person for the job” have left some of the most important jobs undone. Culture in Canada does not belong to a clique of white people from similar backgrounds. Excluding the voices of Indigenous people and people of colour leads to elitist institutions with an ever shrinking support base. Hell, it also leads to a lot of boring predictable art.

How to manage the necessary change is different for every organizations but here are some pointers:

• Recruit and hire differently: If you’re not getting good applications from POC with your current hiring process you’re using the wrong process. You have to make an effort to tap into different networks. Consider recruiting on specialized job boards, getting other POC to share the job posting and asking specific people to apply.

• Write it down: Be up front about the value your organization places on being more representative. Write down and broadcast your intentions internally and externally.

• Support your POC staff: Don’t put your POC staff in the position that they are the only voice for racial diversity and inclusion. It’s everyone’s responsibility.

5. “If it’s easy you aren’t doing it right.”
If you are serious about change within the arts and your organization know that it takes time and effort. A cultural consultant friend always tells his clients, “If it’s easy you aren’t doing it right.” Changing the makeup of your organization will reveal the depth of white privilege and often provoke white fragility both within and outside your organization. Efforts to take down the systemic barriers to participation and achievement faced by racialized communities will often be met with accusations of “reverse racism” or comments like “isn’t that tokenism?”

6. Stick with it.
Lastly you have to play the long game. There will be conflict and bad hires, successes and failures. Think CanCon. There were a few Barney Bentals and Rough Trades before we got to Arcade Fire, Tanya Tagaq and a Tribe Called Red. We don’t even call the latter three Cancon any more. Just good music.

On Monday April 21, 2014 Charles Campbell unveiled Actor Boy: Fractal Engagement, a commission of the EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean Project. Campbell recruited the support of project assistant Deborah Anzinger and community leader Kemar Black (both artists in their own right) to develop a concept for a community parade that would complicate the boundary between spectator and participant. He invited two dozen arts practitioners and enthusiasts from Jamaica’s proverbial “uptown”—a geographic and social category denoting Kingston’s middle and upper classes—to participate in a procession “downtown”—those parts of the city “south of Crossroads,” plagued by poverty, garrison politics, and gang violence.

Campbell had just returned to Jamaica to take up a post as Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica, itself located downtown on Kingston’s once luxurious waterfront. After years of exhibiting in Jamaica and the region while living in Canada, he was now taking his engagement to a new level with a key role at the oldest and largest public art museum in the English-speaking Caribbean.

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Campbell; the curators of En Mas’, ­independent curator Claire Tancons and art historian Krista Thompson; Kemar Black, an artist from the Matthew’s Lane community; and Natasha Levy, one of the invited participants in the procession. The interview took place on May 1, 2014, and was organized by New Local Space (NLS) as part of IN, a series of monthly online art discussions, which are broadcast via Google Hangouts and archived on NLS’ YouTube page.

NICOLE SMYTHE-JOHNSON: Tell me about Fractal Engagement. What were some of your preoccupations in developing this project?

CHARLES CAMPBELL: This project developed while I was researching another project for the National Gallery on muralists and street artists from downtown Kingston. I was going into a lot of inner city communities, and one thing maybe not all of the audience will know is that Kingston is a very divided city in terms of uptown and downtown. A lot of people move back and forth between those borders but still there are some pretty defined boundaries.

So I was really interested in how the artists involved in the project transgressed the boundaries within their communities. Even within uptown and downtown there are gang and political boundaries and so on, and it was really interesting for me how the artists kind of had a pass to move across these.

That was the kernel that inspired the project, and I started thinking a lot about the uptown-downtown boundary and developed the project around ideas of changing the relationship between those two communities….

The vision of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) brought together geometric principles with utopian philosophy to create functional and inhabitable structures that were, in essence, ideological yet demonstrated the capacity of innovation and creativity to prompt social change. These structures, such as his geodesic domes, also represent Fuller’s interest “in technology insofar as it would enhance the quality of life of ordinary people.”[i] In his adoption of Fuller’s spherical constructions, Charles Campbell has found a medium that brings his painting into three-dimensional form[ii] to feature “complex image surfaces, playing between heavily loaded political narratives and utopian ideals.”[iii] A series of free-standing spheres make up a large portion of the works in the Transporter exhibition held in conjunction with Campbell’s production residency at Open Space. Approximately a metre in diameter, each sphere is constructed of triangular shapes cut from brown cardstock with white silkscreened imagery and held together with factory-made bulldog clips. At present, the project also comprises a large-scale triptych painting entitled Bagasse alongside new work that evolved out of the spherical constructions into new and undetermined forms with interactive possibilities. As only one component of the Transporter project, the spheres concretize the intentional visual reference to Fuller’s geodesic domes and clearly represent Campbell’s explorations related to aspirational and utopian futures—which initially led him to consider Fuller’s ideas.[iv]

Photo: Jacquelyn Bortolussi

Photo: Jacquelyn Bortolussi

The allusion to utopianism is made through the connection to Fuller in the form that Campbell has chosen to reproduce again and again At the same time, these works call into question the foundations and context of utopianism through the imagery that adorns his spheres. In Campbell’s view, the imagery is representative of both voluntary and forced human migration, alongside the dichotomy of attraction and repulsion. Looking at the spheres, Campbell aims to create this dichotomous space for the viewer through obfuscated images drawn from the colonial history of his native Jamaica: shackles, vultures, Jamaican Maroon soldiers, slave canoes, and machetes. Imagery such as the empty shackles demonstrate pluralistic signification, as the constraints are open to set free or open to receive, while the vultures demonstrate both the beauty and freedom of flight alongside the repulsion of predatory activity. Further, the canoes used to transport enslaved Africans from the coast of Africa to the slave ships represent, in Campbell’s words, “African-on-African violence, where it would be Africans actually rowing the canoes and Africans in the hold of the canoes, but really it is all human-on-human violence. We are all complicit.”[v] The repeated and rotated white images on the tangible spherical forms, installed seemingly at random throughout the gallery space, employ aesthetic interest and appeal in order to attract. Repulsion is subsequently revealed with greater observation.

The carefully chosen images reference a history that garners little attention in this city, at this point in time, and, in the wake of Idle No More and increased visibility of Indigenous peoples and issues, it has never been more clear that an endured collective amnesia and disinterest has enabled significant holes in the collective Canadian knowledge of the histories that have shaped our present ways of life. Here, Campbell’s Transporter project pushes forward the unrelenting need for greater education regarding the intricacies of historic events—a need for historiography where history is rhizomatic, where the archives of individual histories replace the linear and hierarchical histories of specified places.

Photo: Jacquelyn Bortolussi

Returning to Campbell’s reference to Fuller, I am compelled to consider the implications of utopianism and their relationship to history. I will begin with an idea put forward by German historian Jörn Rüsen: “History wishes to establish ‘how it actually was’; utopia is interested in showing how it actually should or could be.”[vi] Contrary to first thought, this view is not defined as dichotomous; rather, it takes into account the “interrelationship between both modes of looking” through which our daily human lives are interpreted.[vii] More, regardless of its designation as reality, history shares its characterization with utopia as constructed through social and political systems, which are class specific and, therefore, ideological.[viii] Considering Fuller’s utopian desire to create “anticipatory comprehensive design solutions that would benefit the largest segment of humanity while consuming the fewest resources,”[ix] such vision falls in opposition to the impetus of slavery and the imagery that dominates Campbell’s exhibition. The sustained consequences of Christopher Columbus’s fifteenth-century historically sanctioned desire to “[discover] a vast territory of abundant material possibilities.”[x] (in other words, to search for a fantastical and unrealizable utopia) are manifest through systemic injustices. Writing for Infinite Islands: Contemporary Caribbean Art, organized by the Brooklyn Museum, curator Tumelo Mosaka explains,

Having found very little gold and material wealth, Columbus and his men transformed the [Caribbean] islands into industrial production sites for raw materials in the service of the West. This new industrial economy required a large dependable labour force to work the plantations, since the arrival of the Europeans had caused a massive depopulation of the indigenous Indians, who resisted colonialism and were exterminated as a result of massacres, famine, and foreign disease such as smallpox. The colonizers therefore imported a workforce of slaves from Africa and, later, indentured servants from India. The plantations became central to the Western economy, generating raw products such as sugar, coffee, leather, indigo, cocoa, and cotton for European consumption.[xi]

Campbell’s conflicting conflation of Fuller’s utopian structure with the oppressive imagery of shackles, slave canoes, and machetes provides a critical space in which to consider the impetus and the consequence of slavery. Further, the social and geographic origins of an individual or collective utopian vision must be made visible—thus to consider its specific relationship to history—as one shaped by subjectivity and sociopolitical context . While Fuller aspired to mobilize the creative potential of individuals, the notions and implications of universal accessibility and inclusivity are conversely subject to specific social and geo- graphic ideology. Again, what constitutes universality in the classification of humanity may be uniquely determined by political affiliation. The vision of the “new world”—a utopia of new potential, freedom, and plenty—made place for the subordination of slaves that fuelled the sugar trade represented in Bagasse and was abhorrently justified through historically positioned discursive and ideological processes that enabled a hierarchical system of establishing degrees of humanity.[xii]

Photo: Jacquelyn Bortolussi

Of Bagasse, the large painting spanning the east wall of Open Space and depicting the remnants of sugarcane cultivation discarded after the extraction of juices, Campbell explains, “On the level of narrative, Bagasse references the proto-capitalist economy of the sugar plantation and acts as metaphor for economic systems that view society and human relationships as by-products.”[xiii] Such ideas formed the starting point for the Transporter project, and, considering the immediate size and the fragmentation of the painting’s content, the project further “exploit[s] the difference between the optical and cognitive understanding of an image.”[xiv] Here, again, sociopolitical context comes to play, also highlighting the hierarchical systems found within the history of art.

Photo: Jacquelyn Bortolussi

The allusion to modernist painting in Bagasse via its scale and abstracted painterly application also functions to subvert the controlled materiality of ideology and hierarchy through, in essence, an interlacing cause and effect scenario. As Jamaica did not obtain full independence until 1962, the events of modernism are therefore inseparable from colonial rule and, further, inseparable from forced migration and agricultural production for foreign economic gain. Bagasse, in turn, perforates the modernist veil with the inclusion of content, and where it can no longer sustain itself through surficial treatment—as mere paint on canvas—the events of Jamaica’s history are made visible, exposing a multiplicity of investigative possibilities stemming from the enlarged depiction of the sugarcane by-product, bagasse, and the suggestion of race relations in the usage of black and white paint. Likewise, the imagery and form of the spheres flip the investigative possibilities outward. In this rupture, the realities and particularities of Jamaican history are brought to the surface of a modern utopian form. With the potential for ruin found in the impending removal of just one bulldog clip, the modernist constructs fastened by these mass-produced and imported commercial products no longer exist without the consideration of the assorted histories that have contributed to their present state.

Returning to the silkscreened imagery that adorns Campbell’s spheres, the determined references not only implicate the instability of history and the notion of utopia but take into account the subjectivity of the human body. The body is present both in absentia and as actual figures. The inclusion of empty shackles offers another example of multiplicity, evoking both freedom and loss: the bodies of those who perished in transit and the bodies of those who gained freedom through the abolition of slavery or further migration. Such corporeal signification once again compels me to consider the manner in which degrees of humanity are shaped by systemic events and ideologies, creating and reinforcing what is and is not considered a human body in a given social and geographic context, and the subsequent justification of the capture, enslavement, and forced migration of people from Africa, alongside other locations such as India, to the Caribbean. Transporter brings history into view, and as with Campbell’s alter ego, Actor Boy (2009– present), it is utopian thinking, the creative acts of imagining alternate realities, that enables the possibility of change and therefore, the collective imagination joined by corporeal presence becomes a functional agent of change, of revolution.

Photo: Jacquelyn Bortolussi

New work made during Campbell’s residency at Open Space relinquishes the utopian reference through a shift away from the spherical form, yet the centrality of history and politics is retained through the repeated triangular segments with replicating imagery. Keeping the geometric system of interlocking triangles, the new work initially expanded to create experimental shapes that encased structures found within the gallery, such as chairs and columns. In a way, Campbell returns to the traditional form of painting with Portal by creating a diagonal grid of criss-crossed cord, prominently framed by two-by-six-inch planks and mounted on the gallery’s north wall. This new structure acknowledges its function within the institution of art. It evokes the notion of containment within the white cube, and speaks to the limitations of the gallery space to disseminate ideas and innovations beyond its participating audience. The snaking geometric forms appear imbued with the desire to escape the frame, to escape the confines of the gallery space; and as such, they bridge Campbell’s interest in the potential messiness and awkward accidental encounters that can occur when similar works are taken out of the gallery context and into the street for unexpected viewers, as Campbell intends to do.[xv]

Transporter ultimately facilitates space for potential futures, chance encounters, and interconnecting histories. It demonstrates our multiplicities of historical (and continuing) experiences as Canadians, as inhabitants of a nation of First Peoples, of immigrants, and of settlers, whose livelihoods and present realities are forever as they are through colonization. Our histories are far from the glories of proverbial victories shaped by potential utopias. They are real. They are raw. And they are often untold and forgotten.

Photo: Jacquelyn Bortolussi

Toby Lawrence is a curator and writer from Victoria, British Columbia, who has been actively involved in creative endeavours throughout her life She is currently the Downtown Gallery Coordinator at Nanaimo Art Gallery.

I am always sucked in by art’s beauty. But it isn’t necessarily an empty seduction, particularly if an artwork’s beauty is transformative, introducing an insight, or forcing me to adjust my attitudes and beliefs or confront my carefully nurtured ignorance. Charles Campbell’s Transporter deploys beauty to tear open seamless historical narratives. He irritates partially skinned-over political wounds, pulls injustices from the past, reminding, on gorgeously surfaced works of art. The objects he created for Transporter are calibrated with incisive precision We confront a hard and enduring conundrum.

Photograph: Jacquelyn Bortolussi

As essayists Toby Lawrence and Kevin Rodgers eloquently articulate in this book, Transporter splices together models of Buckminster Fuller’s utopian architecture with abstracted images of the slave trade, which founded the economies of North America. Campbell is interested in the interplay between “heavily loaded political narratives and utopian ideals, painting and sculpture, public and private spaces”. This body of work is based in the economic and political histories of the Caribbean—territories and people colonized for resource agriculture—the same economic pillars substantiated Canadian colonialism as well. For most of us in BC, another resource-based economy, Campbell’s big triptych, Bagasse, the instigating image for the Transporter series, bears a disconcertingly strong resemblance to forestry industry clearcuts. Campbell refracts the troubling icons of the slave trade, forced migration, and the collateral tools of abusive economics into politically charged camouflage patterns. His patterns over- paint a series of downscaled geodesic spheres, a modernist form he repurposes—symbolically and politically—in ephemeral unbleached cardstock, hand cut in a process that can only be described as a one-artist sweatshop. Campbell’s camouflage patterns, positioned as surface rather than obscured or hidden, cannily pinpoint political and ideological scotomas: historical blind spots obscure the unsavoury foundations of our comfortable North American culture. Though Campbell’s work refers to histories of migration and colonial exploitation, it is impossible not to draw comparisons to the immediacies of the current corporatization of our culture, economies, and lives.

Photograph: Emily McIvor

During his residency at Open Space, Campbell embarked on another research path, straying from the symmetries of his geodesic paintings to venture into unexpected fugitive amalgamations attached to architecture and furnishings. In his Open Space studio, he clamped these fractal-like geometric forms to a framed grid of taut black cord. On the one hand, the cord refers to the grids traditionally traced over a prepared surface to facilitate the rendering of large-scale murals and history paintings. But the elastic cord carries a hint of menace: it resembles snares, nets, and entrapment accoutrements. His constructions display Campbell’s characteristically lush silkscreened surfaces yet are strange, anonymous, and mildly disturbing. During the last weeks of his residency at Open Space, Campbell situated his new 3D constructions in unannounced sites in Victoria. One of these was a purpose-built cloak for The Homecoming, a naval memorial exploiting the visual trope of the returning soldier, prominently located in a busy tourism area on Wharf Street. Rather than obscuring the intent of sculptor Nathan Scott’s commissioned public monument, Campbell’s intervention conferred a brief moment of potent criticality. Campbell covered the head, shoulder, and arm of the male figure with his triangulated platelets—armouring The Homecoming in cardstock, in paper. What more potent ideological armour than the historiography of power? The Homecoming’s figures are Caucasian, the warrior is a male in casual uniform, reaching to embrace a tiny girl. While Scott successfully met the conditions of his commission’s objectives by creating a memorial that reinforces historical mythologies necessary to marketable warfare, Campbell’s intervention reinstated the monument’s central figure as an anonymous warrior—a warrior who returns from the trauma and randomness of technologized warfare as something else, “a witness to our blind- ness, and therefore a sort of monster perhaps”. Inevitably, Campbell’s warrior cloak was short-lived, ripped down within hours. Campbell continued this program of non-commissioned public art in Kingston, ON, where Transporter was presented this spring Campbell activated the streets of Victoria and Kingston, retelling erased histories in public causeways and alcoves, reasserting the commons as arenas of discourse.

Photograph: Jacquelyn Bortolussi

During the past year, Open Space has hosted two production and presentation residencies. The residencies meet one of our major objectives to “explore the role and status of professional contemporary artist in all disciplines”. Allocating part of Open Space to a studio opens multiple interpretive pathways. A visiting artist in residence is available to colleagues and to the community in ways that a simple fly-in for the opening and installation simply cannot deliver Campbell’s residency is a bit different. We knew that Transporter was previously exhibited at the Jameson Gallery, Duke University, in 2011. When Open Space’s Program Committee reviewed Campbell’s proposal, it generated unanimous enthusiasm. We invited Campbell, a local artist who exhibits his work nationally and inter- nationally, to present this first major exhibition of his work in Victoria. His residency has given us all an opportunity to engage with his practice and, perhaps more significantly, to reconsider the histories, theories, and politics that feed his layered and intensive project.

Open Space thanks Charles Campbell for his willingness to contribute to our program for such a protracted period. It was wonderful having him work in the space with us. He generously shared his ideas with many visitors and visiting students. Open Space is honoured to present Transporter and the new iterations of the project. This publication documents Campbell’s project as it was presented here at Open Space and its subsequent installation at Modern Fuel in Kingston.

Many individuals and organizations have contributed to Transporter. We thank essayist Toby Lawrence for her insightful essay. At Open Space, Jacquelyn Bortolussi and Miles Giesbrecht took on the administration, installation, and photography for Transporter. Doug Jarvis contributed to the project in important ways. Sophie Pouyanne co- ordinated this publication, copy-edited it, and designed it with her mentor Lara Minja of Lime Design. We are grateful to Victoria artist Megan Dickie for her insightful public conversation with Campbell. Summer students Benjamin Willems, Regan Shrumm, Zoe McCormack, and Graham Macaulay assisted with this publication. Volunteers Elena Andrade, Jonathan Dowdall, Emily McIvor, and Mikhail Miller assisted with the off- site installations and photography. At Modern Fuel, Chris Miner photographed the installations. We are grateful to Kevin Rodgers of Modern Fuel for his afterword and for partnering with Open Space to produce this book.

Open Space acknowledges, with gratitude, the indispensible financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council, the Community Gaming Grants of the Province of BC, the CRD, the City of Victoria, and our members and volunteers.

Helen Marzolf is an artist, educator, and curator who is currently the Executive Director of Open Space, an artist-run centre that organizes visual arts, new music, media arts, literary, and interdisciplinary projects in Victoria.

Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre, Kingston ON
May 4 – June 15
“Charles Campbell packs complex references into artworks of unnerving, covert beauty. The Transporter project, inhabiting the interstices of artistic and political concerns, began initially as a visual investigation of the phenomenon of forced migration. Campbell discovered instead that his work sparked the desire to find a material form for his painterly motifs, which had been drawn from political imagery, and therein discovered a way to invoke the interplay between various aspirational futures and the present.”

]]>http://charlescampbellart.com/2013/01/current-and-upcoming/feed0Critical Juncture: Review of the 2012 National Biennialhttp://charlescampbellart.com/2013/01/critical-juncture-review-of-the-2012-national-biennial
http://charlescampbellart.com/2013/01/critical-juncture-review-of-the-2012-national-biennial#commentsFri, 11 Jan 2013 04:11:58 +0000charleshttp://charlescampbellart.com/?p=1084No matter where else I go or how far my work travels exhibiting in Jamaica always stirs me up, and showing at the current National Biennial in Kingston is no exception. The consensus is that the show is perhaps the best biennial to date and there is a palpable excitement about the exhibition. Much of the work confidently breaks out of the traditional mold of Jamaican art. It is more challenging and ambitious, both in terms of scale and content. But it is also reveals some of the major deficits that exist in the Jamaican art scene.

If the 2010 Biennial saw the rise of photo based work, this year marked the step into new media. Video installations by Storm Sauter, Ebony Patterson, Olivia McGilchrist and Oneika Russel are among the exhibitions highlights. Russel combines animation, filmed and found images to present her highly idiosyncratic but affecting A Natural History 4. Sauter’s Tied, a ten minute short film, poetically interweaves the contradictory internal and external worlds of a woman in an apparently joyful and loving relationship. Patterson’s The Observation (Bush Cockrel) – A fictitious History continues the artist’s investigation of Jamaican male sexuality. Two men dressed in heavily patterned clothing and wearing feathered masks roam around a patch of Jamaican bush. Here the play between artificiality and nature come to the fore and the strutting bush cockles are dandified men exploring a jungle of real and fake flora.

Olivia McGilchrist, Ernestine and Me, video still

McGilchrist’s Ernestine and Me is a humorous yet poignant exploration of cultural identity. Set against a backdrop of photographs of a Jamaican family of mixed racial heritage McGilchrist portrays herself as ‘Whitey’, a blond haired girl in a white dress with a white plastic mask. Throughout the ten minute video she is variously taunted, tormented and teased by a cast of characters ranging from dreadlocked youth to school-girls to uptown and downtown women. At times playing rag doll, at times playfully engaging with her tormentors McGilchrist is danced spun and has her hair braided, all to an infectious ska/reggae beat. What falls out of the piece are the often unspoken tensions between race and class in Jamaica and the insistence that people conform to a predetermined place in society. It considers what it means to be alien, what constitutes legitimacy and how much of our ancestral baggage we should or choose to carry.

Strong work has also come from some of our other young artists but here the fissures in the current state of Jamaican art start to emerge. Some of the strongest images in the show come from the cameras and digital dark rooms of O’Neil Lawrence, Marlon James, and Marvin Bartley. Lawrence shows one of the pieces from his much acclaimed Son of a Champion series, while James’ Gisele is a disquieting portrait of self-harm.

Marlon James, Gisele

Bartley’s Birth of Venus is a skillfully and meticulously constructed image based on Botticelli’s original by the same name. However here Bartley chooses to hyper-sexualize his subjects. While his strategy of populating the all white world of classical art history with black bodies is a sound one his representation of the female body in this context remains problematic. Bartley consciously draws from a history that asserted the role of women as objects and while he does perhaps give them a degree of sexual agency here, his women are still essentially props for male desire.

The same problem exists to a much larger degree in the work of Stefan Clarke. It’s difficult to read His Life; Faith/Love/Death as anything other than violent male fantasy complete with axe murderer, lesbian love and women in bondage. Of course the objectification of women is nothing new to Jamaican art. It exists in a supposedly more benign form in the nudes of Barrington Watson and the stylized photographic silhouettes of countless photographers. It’s also touched on by Philip Thomas’ Upper St. Andrew Concubine, a beautifully painted triptych whose central panel is a semi nude woman on a bed, the two side panels showing sides of beef.

Marvin Bartley, Birth of Venus, detail

Sex, desire and even violence are all legitimate topics for art and I would hate to see Jamaican art sanitized by ‘politically correct’ versions of representation but it’s still distressing that no one even seems to notice cases of blatant objectification.

Visible also in the show is the widening gap between artists willing to take risks and challenge themselves and those more intent on keeping within their established artistic boundaries. Although this is often seen as a division between young and old several of our more established artists have shown themselves willing to push themselves out of their comfort zones to produce mature and powerful work. Hope Brooks’ Slavery Trilogy takes on the notion of racial hierarchies successfully venturing into the type of content heavy work that she scrupulously avoided for much of her career. Judith Salmon’s Memory Pockets is a quiet but effective piece inviting audience participation

Laura Facey’s installation De Hangin Of Phibba An Her Private Parts An De Bone Yard is perhaps her most powerful piece to date. Here Facey has moved away from her symbolist tendencies with a work that deals with material and form in a much more primal way. If other artist in the exhibition showed male fantasies of violence and pointed to racial tension in Jamaica, here is their result, a massive and tortured block of cedar like flayed flesh complete with female genitalia and a floor covered with oversized wooden bones.

Also worthy of mention are the gouache and mixed media drawings A Collection of Strange Fruit by New Jersey bases Shoshanna Weinberger and the starkly arresting painting of a goat’s head by recent Edna Manley College graduate Greg Bailey. Other recent graduates of the College are also pushing themselves as they explore new and non-traditional mediums and challenge themselves with both scale and content. Although some of this work needs to mature there is nevertheless a sense of excitement and promise.

Shoshanna Weinberger, A Collection of Strange Fruit

The exhibition lets us see two sides of Omari Sediki Ra’s work. In his exhibition as 2011 Silver Musgrave Medallist we see one of Jamaica’s most potent and political imagists. Here Ra challenges Jamaica’s Eurocentric art audiences with his Black Nationalist vision and cutting social commentary. Ra’s work in the main exhibition however seems to be almost a caricature of itself and lacks the raw impact of the Musgrave exhibition. I was left wondering whether he’s become more interested in mocking the Jamaican art establishment than actually making art. Maybe he has a point.

All round the 2012 Biennial is a powerful and demanding exhibition. Jamaican art is undergoing a period of ambitious expansion with many of our younger artists and several of the more established willing to break new ground. But it is also a world with some serious deficits. Number one among these is the lack of critical engagement with the work. Across the Caribbean one is hard pressed to find anything other than celebratory writing on art and this is much to our detriment. We have to learn to give and accept criticism and learn how to take personality and ego out of the equation. The result would not only be stronger artwork; a healthy dialogue around art would actually allows it to embed itself more deeply in the culture amplifying its power and relevance.

Many of the strongest works in the exhibition cast a critical eye on Jamaican society with the aim of enabling growth and change. It’s time we as artists credited ourselves with the same.

It was December 1998 and Chris Ofili had just won the Turner Prize for his exuberant, elephant dung embellished canvases. I was in the middle of my MA at Goldsmiths College and was both fascinated with and made uncomfortable by Ofili’s work. The press covering the Prize reduced his paintings to what I found most problematic in Ofili’s work, focussing on the titillating novelty of elephant dung and on the artist’s racial and ethnic character. In addition Ofili seemed to court this type of coverage, and the work, I had to admit, invited it. Paintings such as the Adoration of Captain Shit represented the black male as a flat, sexually potent comic book character. Nevertheless my interest in Ofili refused to wane and if anything increased. The lush seductive surfaces, the painting’s multi-layered complexity and the in your face images all held my attention. In the end the very problems I had with the work seemed to point to long felt contradictions in the signification and self-representation of black culture. Captain Shit had something to say.

Black artists in Britain at that time faced the usual dilemma. Work that touched on just about any aspect of our lived experience was dismissed as dealing with ‘black issues’, or, as the euphemism still has it, ‘identity’. Work that didn’t was seen as derivative of our white peers. The context for our work was completely determined by our racial character, and to insist that the work be viewed on its own merits was doomed to failure.

Ofili’s embrace of the most obvious stereotypes of blackness initially struck me as perverse. The visibility politics I grew up on dictated that what was needed was to broaden the understanding of what it means to be black…

Michael Parchment's Death of a Don in front of Bagasse at the Art Gallery of Mississauga

R.M. Vaughan from Globe and Mail reviews the exhibition ’Contemporary Jamaican Art: Circa 1962/Circa 2012′, which is on view at the Art Gallery of Mississauga through September 8th:

I have a bad habit. Or, had.

I used to read the comments that follow online newspaper articles and talk-radio forums. It was perverse but addictive entertainment.

Now, however, after the recent spate of shootings in Toronto, and Mayor Ford’s thoughts about “immigrants” and crime, I have been cured of my addiction. Cured by the tidal wave of racist anti-Caribbean commentary people have gleefully posted online, for all the whole world to see, as if proud of themselves.

Folks, all communities have criminals. Yours and mine too.

But what else do all communities have? Artists.

I don’t pretend that art can cure anything, nor does it necessarily try or desire to. But the outburst of inter-cultural misapprehension faces a strong (and often very beautiful) counter-argument in Contemporary Jamaican Art: Circa 1962/Circa 2012, at the Art Gallery of Mississauga.

To be clear, I do not want to position this fine exhibition as some kind of outreach program – indeed, the show, part of the 2012 celebrations of Jamaica’s 50 years of independence, has been in the works for more than a year – nor, especially, do I want to localize the current disquiet in any one, or any one hundred, particular diasporas. Or to localize it at all. I’m not a cop.

But, rather, I offer that, given recent events and the unfortunate subsequent climate of maligning and finger-pointing that pervades, a good way to fight the knee-jerk inclination to narrowly define a community (any community) is to explore the multiplicity and splendour of said community’s art.

I would offer the same recipe if the minority I belong to suddenly found itself under unfair scrutiny. Art takes the one-dimensional and makes it kaleidoscopic.

Tidily curated by the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Veerle Poupeye, Circa 1962/Circa 2012 unfolds in a straightforward but effective fashion. In the gallery’s long opening hallway, works (primarily paintings) from the decade surrounding the year of independence are (more or less) chronologically arrayed. In the gallery’s larger main space, works made on or near the year 2012 are displayed.

Essentially, one “walks” the island’s art history – granted, it’s a far from complete history, but still a thoughtful survey. What will strike the viewer first is the abrupt shift in tone and style between the works found in the hallway and those in the main space.

The works made around the time of independence look outward for inspiration – to American mid-century abstraction, to the social realist painting movements of the 1930s, to Constructivist murals, to West African sculptural styles, pre- and post-colonial, to Impressionism and mannered post-Expressionism.

They are no less accomplished or lovely because of their obvious external influences, but, like Canadian art in the first half of the last century, these works appear to have been made under the perception that the “centre,” which is both an aspirational space and a burden to the colonized, is forever elsewhere, never where one actually lives.

Conversely, the works in the main space, a generous selection of everything from video projections to digitally-manipulated photographs to machined sculptures to massive installations, reach outward, and are made with full confidence in their particular and shared importance in the international art stream. The jolt is stunning, akin to stepping, for comparison, from a room full of sweet old Krieghoffs into a mixed-media conflagration by art star Shary Boyle.

Furthermore, the contemporary works present not one Jamaica, but many Jamaicas; they acknowledge and celebrate the nation’s pluralities, and thrive because of them. Jamaica, the main space proudly heralds, is fast becoming an art world powerhouse, one that looks first to please itself.

It’s hard to pick favourites in a show that is arguably more about the big picture than individual works, but here’s a go.

Be sure to find Eugene Hyde’s 1959 etching of an abstracted figure carrying a bundle of produce, a work as ethereal, in its own down-to-earth way, as a William Blake etching. Osmond Watson’s 1968 oil on canvas of a busy city corner throbs with weird deep sea greens and icy blues, and is both dreamlike and social-realist-blunt in its depiction of bustle, commerce and noise.

Mallica “Kapo” Reynold’s painting of a crowd of dead people ascending to heaven is deeply strange, primarily because only two of the blessed are visible in profile. As for the rest, we can see only the backs of their ovate heads, heads bundled up like newborns swaddled in pastel blankets.

In the contemporary collection, wonder at Charles Campbell’s massive printed paper sculptures, balls of interlocking card held together with bulldog clips. Equally steady-handed is Petrona Morrison’s video and text installation exploring the media coverage of a police raid. At the work’s centre plays a looped video of a young, shirtless black man extending his arms, in either defiance or surrender, or neither. The man’s body anchors the near-hysterical coverage with a shock of real, and too easily destroyed, flesh.

And don’t miss Toronto’s own Michael Chambers’s two conversely quiet works – a meditative photograph of a single empty chair lingering, slightly askew, in a long, highly polished hallway, and a companion piece showing a nude man, a figure of health and vigour, resting in (or resisting?) a large, gleaming wooden box. The man is masked, as if embarrassed not by his nudity, but his own beauty.